General

I'm considering to use your email validation service but I'm concerned about the privacy of my data.
Email-Validator.net is a service operated by Byteplant, a company located in Germany and operating according to EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standards and the German Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG) - one of the strictest data protection and privacy legislations in the world (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesdatenschutzgesetz for details).
We do not process or store email addresses for any purpose other than validation.
We do not share any client data with any third party at any time.
We retain personal data processed on behalf of our clients for as long as needed to provide services to our clients.
All data from API requests and batch/list processing will be automatically deleted within 14 days after the data has been made available to us.

Is there any risk that our IPs and domains get blacklisted by using your service?All processing is done on our servers, your IP addresses and domains are not affected in any way by the Email-Validator.net service - absolutely no blacklisting risk for your IPs and domains.

A valid email address just bounced. How can this happen?
Email Validator only tests if the recipient address exists.
It does not test the antispam policies employed at the receiving mail server, as no mail is actually sent.

Make sure

your mail server's DNS data contains valid MX, PTR and SPF records,

the sender address exists and mail to this address is accepted by your server.

Also, in order to send email reliably, your mail server needs to have a good reputation.
Cleaning your email lists before you start a new email marketing campaign of course helps a lot.

Why is my email address bad? I know it exists, because I just created it.
The email validator service caches results for several days, so if an email tested as bad, it will continue to show up as bad for a few days until it is re-evaluated.

Email Validator REST Web API

Which availability do you guarantee for the Email Validator service?
Our Email Validation Online API is hosted at three different locations in Europe. We guarantee an availability of 99.9% - please see the API server status page for real-time availability information.

What is the average API response time?
API requests will be typically answered within 1 second.

Where do I find detailed descriptions for all validation result codes?
Our online email validation process provides 100% accurate results in real-time. For each email address you get a detailed validation status.

What does the API result code 114 mean?
If you receive a 114 reply, the check could not be completed within the request timeout period.
The mail server for this address may be unavailable at the moment, or it may implement Greylisting.
You can retry an address with a 114 result every 5-20 minutes, until a final result is available.

What does the API result code 118 mean?
To guarantee short response times to customers providing online services or running call centers, the Email Validator API implements rate limiting. If you have large amounts of email addresses to check, consider submitting these addresses as an email list. This also frees you from the need to retry greylisted addresses.

Email Validator List Processing

How do I validate email addresses from a database, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system or Excel?
Databases, CRM systems and Excel are capable to export data to CSV (comma-separated values) files - please see the answer to the next question for instructions on how to upload a CSV file for validation.

How do I validate email addresses from Excel or a CSV file?
You can start the validation process by uploading a CSV file (one email address per line, detailed instructions for Excel users) with a maximum size of 250MB (split larger lists into multiple files).
Excel files must be exported to CSV first:

Open the file in Excel.

Click Menu | Save As (Other Formats).

Enter a name for the file and choose "Unicode Text (*.txt)".

Click Save.

Why does my validation task not start automatically, even though I paid the correct amount?
We use a third-party service (MyCommerce Share-It / Digital River) to manage payments. Please use the same email address both for your validation task and for the Share-It purchase, so that the task to start can be identified. If you already used a different email address, please send us an email so we can start your task manually.

Why does the list upload web form report thousands of addresses, when I only uploaded a few hundred?
Our automatic format detection tries to detect and convert files submitted in many common spreadsheet and archive formats, but this sometimes fails.
If this happens, make sure you submit your list in one of the following formats:

If you have a spreadsheet, use your spreadsheet software to export the list to text/csv format.
You can check your list with our Email List Validator tool before uploading.

Account Management

Why am I unable to login to my account?
We use a third-party service (MyCommerce Share-It / Digital River) to manage payments. Share-It implement their own customer accounts. Please do not confuse Share-It accounts with Email Validator accounts, both may use different email addresses and/or passwords.

How do I log into my MyCommerce Share-It account to manage my orders, subscriptions and invoices?
You can log into the MyCommerce Share-It Customer Care Center using the following steps:

Your data is safe with us. Only you have access to your data. We process and store your data only for the purpose of validation and delete all personally identifiable end-user information within 14 days after the data has been made available to us.